Re: Real World News.."And so it goes"

[Mitch Stone <mstone@vc.net>]

In reply to Erick Andrews's message sent 4/15/98 9:55 AM:

>One of the biggest and confusing aspects about Word, perhaps I should say
>a "cute trick", is when someone new to Word does bring in a file other than
>the "current *.doc" type, makes changes, saves the changes, then exits Word.
>A message window now pops up that warns you that the current one is not
>a Word document:  Do you want to save it??  <yes>  <no>  <cancel>.
>
>What's confusing to newbies is that they've made changes to it (say it's
>a text only file) and they're afraid they'll lose their changes.  So they 
>click on 
><yes>, and lo'n'behold, now they have a Word *.doc when they only wanted 
>the plain old text version.
>
>A small point perhaps, but certainly a coercive one that's bugged me for 
>years.

I think most Microsoft applications do this. I've been frequently annoyed 
by the same "feature" in Excel. I don't suppose it's intentional so much 
as just another example of Microsoft's lousy human engineering.

   Mitch Stone
   Editor, Boycott Microsoft
   http://www.vcnet.com/bms 
 +---
   An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.--- Michael Korda